Urban Living Labs

Experimenting with City Futures

Simon Marvin, Harriet Bulkeley, Lindsay Mai, Kes McCormick, Yuliya Voytenko Palgan, Simon Marvin, Harriet Bulkeley, Lindsay Mai, Kes McCormick, Yuliya Voytenko Palgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351862677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

All cities face a pressing challenge – how can they provide economic prosperity and social cohesion while achieving environmental sustainability? In response, new collaborations are emerging in the form of urban living labs – sites devised to design, test and learn from social and technical innovation in real time. The aim of this volume is to examine, inform and advance the governance of sustainability transitions through urban living labs. Notably, urban living labs are proliferating rapidly across the globe as a means through which public and private actors are testing innovations in buildings, transport and energy systems. Yet despite the experimentation taking place on the ground, we lack systematic learning and international comparison across urban and national contexts about their impacts and effectiveness. We have limited knowledge on how good practice can be scaled up to achieve the transformative change required. This book brings together leading international researchers within a systematic comparative framework for evaluating the design, practices and processes of urban living labs to enable the comparative analysis of their potential and limits. It provides new insights into the governance of urban sustainability and how to improve the design and implementation of urban living labs in order to realise their potential.

1
INTRODUCTION

Simon Marvin, Harriet Bulkeley, Lindsay Mai, Kes McCormick and Yuliya Voytenko Palgan

1. Introduction

All cities face a pressing challenge – how can they provide economic prosperity and social cohesion while achieving environmental sustainability? In response, new collaborations are emerging in the form of “urban living labs” (ULL) – sites devised to design, test and learn from social and technical innovation in real time. ULL are proliferating rapidly across cities internationally as one means through which this might take place. While the notion of ULL is broad and can be interpreted in multiple ways, at its heart is the idea that urban sites can provide a learning arena within which the co-creation of innovation can be pursued between research organisations, public institutions, private sector and community actors (Liedtke, Welfens, Rohn and Nordmann, 2012). Through the design and development of ULL, public-, private- and community-based actors are seeking to deliver innovative and transformative improvements across the urban milieu, from buildings to green space, transport to energy systems, local food to sustainable forms of consumption. For their protagonists, ULL are seen not only as a means through which to gain experience, demonstrate and test ideas, but also as a step towards developing responses that have the potential to be scaled up across systems of provision in order to achieve sustainability transitions at a large scale. However, the extent to which these experimental interventions can address these urban challenges has yet to be interrogated. There has to date been relatively little critical analysis of the emergence, practices and consequences of ULL. This book seeks to address this deficit.

Our aim is to critically analyse and advance understanding of the governance of sustainability transitions through a focus on the emergence, practices and consequences of ULL. These initiatives are proliferating rapidly across the globe as a means through which public and private actors are testing innovations in buildings, transport and energy systems. Yet despite the experimentation taking place on the ground, we lack systematic learning and international comparison across urban and national contexts about their impacts and effectiveness. We have limited knowledge on how good practice can be scaled up to achieve the transformative change required. This is a critical research and policy gap that the book will seek to address.

The core question that this book seeks to ask is whether ULL are best understood as either a new, innovative and transformative method of governing sustainability transitions or whether they are an extension of existing techniques and methods of urban governance that may lead to incremental improvement at best and the continuation of urban social inequalities and environmental challenges at worst. In order to do this, we address three questions. First, we ask what is distinctive about the existing landscape of ULL? Here, we provide an empirical overview of the emergence of ULL, examine how this differs from other forms of urban experimentation, map the location of ULL and undertake detailed empirical analysis of ULL in different urban contexts. Second, we consider how to develop a theoretical approach to analyse ULL. Here, we develop a systematic conceptual framework for evaluating the design, practices and processes of ULL to enable the comparative analysis of their potential and limits. Finally, we ask what are the consequences of ULL – do they lead to transformation or is this more about the maintenance of business as usual? Here, we undertake a comparative analysis within the three parts of the book to provide new conceptual and policy insights into the governance of urban sustainability transitions and improve the design and implementation of ULL in order to understand the implications of this mode of urban experimentation.

Developing this critical perspective is vital if we are to further the use of ULL and understand their limits. Observers have warned that the growing interest in ULL is premature. While technical analyses of the effects of ULL have been conducted (Gil-Castineira, Costa-Montenegro, Gonzalez-Castano, López-Bravo, Ojala and Bose, 2011), we currently lack an integrated assessment of their social, political and economic impacts and how these vary across different national, urban and sectoral contexts. Furthermore, there is limited understanding as to how they can effectively facilitate urban sustainability transitions (Evans and Karvonen, 2013; Nevens, Frantzeskaki, Gorissen and Loorbach, 2012). A range of models are currently being deployed, and yet the empirical data on their relative strengths and weaknesses is fragmented and inconclusive. In order to develop the evidence base that can support ULL as a means for achieving sustainability, a systematic and comparative analysis of their design, operation and impacts is required.

To contribute towards this agenda, the book will connect ULL with the governing of sustainability transitions through an internationally comparative approach examining the connections between: the design of ULL; the practices through which they are implemented and managed; and the processes by which they seek to affect urban systems and governance domains. It develops a robust framework for analysing these three dimensions comparatively in different international multilevel governance contexts. We will focus on ULL that seek to deliver sustainability transitions in the building, transport and energy systems of Africa, Asia, Europe and North America to further the evidence base required to develop new research agendas and shape future policy priorities in this area. The rest of the introduction examines the research and societal importance of ULL, the conceptual framework developed for the book and the structure of the argument.

There are two interlinked sets of rationales for a critical and comparative analysis of the emergence of ULL in both academic and societal developments. The first concerns the role of ULL as a specific form of socio-technical innovation and a distinctive type of experimentation in how urban sustainability may be governed. The second concerns the emergence and rapid acceleration of ULL as a distinctive response in both urban research and urban policy priorities. Each of these rationales are explored in further detail below focusing on the specificity of ULL.

2. The governance and dynamics of ULL

It is increasingly recognised that achieving urban sustainability is not just a matter of gathering more data, creating technical fixes or establishing the right institutions. Rather, transitions are required in the ways in which systems of provision and services are designed, organised and delivered in diverse urban contexts. Such transitions encompass new technologies and infrastructures, but also require shifts in markets, practices, policy and culture (Bulkeley, Castán Broto, Hodson and Marvin, 2010; Frantzeskaki and Loorbach, 2010). To govern such transitions remains a key challenge for urban policy-makers, planners and practitioners. In response to the complexities and uncertainties involved, new forms of innovation and experimentation are emerging as a means through which governance can be realised (Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2012; Frantzeskaki, Wittmayer and Loorbach, 2014; Truffer and Coenen, 2012). ULL offer one such form of experimentation. While the notion of ULL is broad and can be interpreted in multiple ways, at its heart is the idea that urban sites can provide a learning arena within which the co-creation of innovation can be pursued between research organisations, public institutions, private sector and community actors (Liedtke et al., 2012). ULL are seen not only as a means through which to gain experience, demonstrate and test ideas, but also as a step towards scaling-up responses in systems of provision that will have improved effectiveness, political traction and public support. In this sense, ULL are not a stand-alone set of interventions, but part of a wider “politics of experimentation” through which the governing of urban sustainability is increasingly taking place (Bulkeley et al., 2016; Evans, Karvonen and Raven, 2016; McGuirk, Bulkeley and Dowling, 2014).

Understanding the means through which ULL are designed, implemented and take effect can usefully draw on the tradition of innovation studies that has informed the development of the concepts of socio-technical transitions and strategic niche management. Yet ULL, like other forms of socio-technical intervention, are more than merely forms of innovation. They constitute a means through which urban sustainability is governed. Forging a critical and constructive dialogue between insights into the development of urban innovations and the nature of urban governance is regarded as a critical next step for research on sustainability transitions. A key starting point for this analysis has been developing our understanding of how and why specific arenas for innovation might come to play a part in the wholesale transformation of urban systems requires an engagement with research on socio-technical transitions (Smith, Voss and John, 2010). This work has examined the role that niches and experiments play in developing transitions in the face of relatively stable regimes (Schot and Geels, 2008). Existing systems tend to be difficult to dislodge because they are stabilised by regimes and lock-in processes that lead to path dependency and “entrapment”, constraining alternatives (Grin, Rotmans and Schot, 2010). One means via which the governance of transitions is thought to proceed is through strategic niche management (Kemp, Schot and Hoogma,1998) – whereby governments, or other actors, deliberately seek to establish conditions under which niches for innovation can grow and “breakthrough” existing regime conditions – or “experimentation”, a less directed process which seeks to create spaces for innovation and alternatives to be tested and experience gained (Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2012). The potential of niches to lead to regime transition is thought to depend on growing the social networks, innovation and learning that they establish (Szejnwald Brown and Vergragt, 2008). Emphasis has been placed on the role of niches as protective environments that provide space for the development, testing and failure of novel innovations, and where new networks can be supported and sustained (Smith and Raven, 2012).

Yet despite its central place in the concept of socio-technical transitions, there has been relatively little analysis of how such forms of protection are afforded. Smith and Raven (2012) argue that alongside processes of shielding and nurturing, niches and experiments foster different forms of empowerment – means through which they are able to either “fit and conform” or “stretch and reform” existing regimes. While research has so far tended to focus on questions of the design and production of niches and experiments, analysing these processes requires that more attention is given to dynamics of agency and power – the practices of governance on the ground (Smith and Raven 2012). At the same time, there are growing calls for research to engage with the spatial and political contexts within which transitions evolve, and the processes through which niches and experiments are related to these wider systemic contexts (Coenen, Benneworth and Truffer, 2012; Meadowcroft, 2007; Shove and Walker, 2007). In this regard, understanding the role of city regions in the governance of transition pathways has become a critical area for research and action (Bulkeley, Castán Broto, Hodson and Marvin, 2010; Coenen and Truffer, 2012; Nevens et al., 2012).

In parallel, there has been a growing interest within urban studies on forms of experimentation and specific ULL taking place in cities. In contrast to the system level perspective offered by transitions research, work on ULL has tended to focus on individual cases and their effects in creating new knowledge and forms of intervention in specific contexts (Evans and Karvonen, 2013). This work has highlighted the importance of intermediaries – specific organisations operating between different social interests (and technologies) – to produce outcomes that would not have been possible without their involvement (Evans and Karvonen, 2013; Hodson and Marvin, 2010; Hodson, Marvin and Bulkeley, 2013). Yet despite insights into ULL in this literature, there is a lack of understanding about which factors facilitate or hinder their success (Shipley, 2000; Van Eijndhoven, Frantzeskaki and Loorbach, 2013) and the processes through which ULL come to shape the governance of wider provision systems.

Each of these approaches – the study of socio-technical systems in transition and urban accounts of new forms of sustainability governance and intermediation – can contribute to our understanding of the dynamics and implications of ULL. In order to understand the role of ULL in urban sustainability transitions, we focus in the remainder of the book on their role in governing sustainability transitions. Drawing together insights from the literatures on socio-technical transitions, urban sustainability and infrastructure governance, we suggest that central to any understanding of the work of ULL in the city are three interrelated processes. The design of ULL – the purpose and visions that underpin the initiation of ULL, and the institutional and infrastructural arrangements through which it is enacted. The practice of ULL – the techniques, mechanisms and every day actions through which the ULL is implemented and maintained on a day-to-day basis. The processes of ULL – the means through which ULL are enrolled within and beyond their specific contexts and come to take effect within socio-technical systems, such as learning, translation, scaling up and so forth. We use these entry points to analyse the case studies presented in the book, but also as a means of understanding the emergence of ULL in the urban governance landscape distinguishing the different forms or modes through which they take place.

3. The emergence and multiple modes of ULL

3.1. Emergence of ULL

Our analysis suggests that ULL have emerged as a particular response to three sets of issues: first, the fragmentation of urban sustainability discourse; second, the challenges of generating systemic change in the organisation of urban infrastructure and the built environment; and third, the introduction of new partners and social interest in urban experimentation. We will briefly look at each of these in turn explaining how these shifts have structured a context in which ULL have become a focus for urban policy and research.

First, there is no longer a singular pathway towards an urban sustainability transition (de Jong, Joss, Schraven, Zhan and Weijnen, 2015). Since the global economic crisis of 2008, there is powerful evidence of a fr...